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High Times

By A.O. SCOTT

Published: July 25, 2004

Correction Appended

THE plot of ''Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,'' succinctly summarized in the movie's title, consists of an amusing, anarchic grab-bag of road-picture mishaps and low-comedy gags. Many of the comic elements are predictable (dumb stoners doing dumb, stoned things, sexual come-ons and gross-outs of various kinds) while others are less so, like the part when Neil Patrick Harris, playing himself, starts licking the headrests on a Honda.

But a clever bait-and-switch early in the film signals its sly subversive intentions. Its director is Danny Leiner, who made ''Dude, Where's My Car?,'' and he seems at first to pick up more or less where that movie, or any of its illustrious predecessors going back to ''Porky's,'' left off. An ex-frat boy type, with a roomy office in a New York high-rise, is finishing up his work week. His pal, immediately recognizable as the wilder half of a classic buddy-movie pair, shows up proposing a fun-filled weekend of babes, booze and bong hits. But what about that big report due on Monday? No problem: just dump it on the Korean guy in the far cubicle. Our hero is free to pursue the carefree debauchery that is his birthright.

Except, of course, that the pale-skinned frat boy type is not the hero at all. He and his friend (who happen to be played by the screenwriters, Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz) are walk-on doofuses who pretty much walk out of the movie, leaving it in the hands of that unassuming Korean guy, Harold. He turns out to be the more uptight half of a classic buddy-movie pair -- the wilder half is his roommate, a South Asian former pre-med named Kumar -- intent on claiming their own share of carefree debauchery. In the process, they pretty much revolutionize the slacker-stoner-comedy genre.

Well, perhaps that's a bit grandiose, given that what Harold and Kumar really want to do, after a few Friday night tokes, is satisfy a powerful case of the munchies, an urge that leads them deep into the wilds of New Jersey and lands them in all kinds of trouble. But the movie's apparently simple shifts of racial and generational emphasis -- replacing the traditional white (or, in recent variants, black) teenagers or undergraduates with Asian-Americans in their post-college years -- at once upend the conventions of youth-oriented goofball comedy and revitalize them. ''Harold and Kumar'' is as delightfully stupid as ''Friday'' or ''Road Trip'' or ''Wet Hot American Summer,'' but it is also one of the few recent comedies that persuasively, and intelligently, engage the social realities of contemporary multicultural America.

In some ways, Mr. Leiner, Mr. Hurvitz and Mr. Schlossberg and their stars, John Cho and Kal Penn, are broadening a venerable tradition of ethnic humor, trafficking in stereotypes and sending them up with equal verve. The stoners down the hall, for instance, are a pair of fast-talking former yeshiva boys who fire up a shofar for some Sabbath eve toking. On a pit stop in Princeton, Harold is dragooned into attending a meeting of an Asian-American student group, whose painfully earnest members pepper him with geeky questions about his investment banking job. Harold, confronted with the specter of his own squareness and conformity, manages to flee, only to miss out on the group's subsequent activity -- a raucous, uninhibited party, with drugs courtesy of the geekiest kid in the bunch. (The spectacle of good students behaving badly presents a tamer version of the studious Asian-American teenagers gone wild in ''Better Luck Tomorrow,'' Justin Lin's 2001 drama of honor-roll hoodlums, which featured Mr. Cho and which is name-checked in ''Harold and Kumar.'') The filmmakers are happy to laugh at Harold's buttoned-up careerism and cautious deference to authority, and also at the fact that Kumar's immigrant family, obsessed with the need for him to get high marks and make good impressions, seems to be composed entirely of physicians. But they also lash out -- in remarkably good humor, it must be said -- at the lazy, bigoted perceptions that bedevil Harold and Kumar in the course of their all-night odyssey.

The prejudice that Harold and Kumar encounter -- expressed by a carload of extreme-sports headbangers and by doltish New Jersey law enforcement officers, among others -- is more a matter of inconvenience, of moronic uncoolness, than oppression. And in fighting back against it, Harold and Kumar are motivated less by a sense of wounded pride or profound injustice than by a familiar individualist exasperation. They just want hamburgers (and sex, and decent weed and a good time) -- which is to say they want what is theirs by birthright as young, affluent, reasonably good-looking American consumers. Though they are occasionally abused and insulted, they also carry with them assumptions of social privilege, intellectual capital and economic opportunity. They share a decent apartment in Hoboken. Harold has a spiffy silver Honda (at least until Doogie Howser gets a hold of it) paid for by his white collar, Wall Street job, while Kumar dawdles on the way to medical school, supported by his father while he indulges in a bit of late-adolescent rebellion.

Correction: August 15, 2004, Sunday An article on July 25 about the film ''Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle'' misspelled the surname of one of the writers at one point. He is Jon Hurwitz, not Hurvitz. Correction: August 22, 2004, Sunday An article on July 25 about the film ''Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle'' misidentified the car driven by the title characters. It is a Toyota, not a Honda.